10 Things You Can Start Doing Today to Save Time in BC!

This blog post is sharing of YouTube content that I participated in creating, but does not live on my YouTube channel. This is to create an easy way for LifeHackers to find my content and support the events I participate in, at the same time! Click here for full listing!

Event NameDate
DynamicsCon VirtualMarch 2023

Transcript of Content (Disclaimer – Auto Generated):

Introduction

0:00 [Music] please welcome Microsoft MVP superhero Shawn Dorward today he’ll be showcasing

0:07 premiering content in his session 10 things you can start doing today to save time in BC please stick around after a

0:14 short session for a live q a [Music]

0:30 well hello there and thank you once again for joining me here at dynamicscon this time 2023 it’s spring can you

0:38 believe it I can I love it but thank you so much for taking the time to vote for the sessions to be here today and more

0:44 specifically to vote for this particular session 10 things you can start doing today to save you time in business

0:50 Central don’t forget to use the chat throughout the session and I’ll be around for a live q a so let’s go ahead

0:57 and get started I’ll talk about uh myself a little bit Chat Guidelines

1:03 as we get into the session but let’s go ahead and uh just have some chat guidelines if you

1:09 don’t mind I love the interactive chat so please feel free to use that let me know if you’re using this tip let me

1:15 know if you have a tip that kind of compliments this tip I think that’s really cool to share with Community as

1:20 well also if you have a question I will be here at the Q a at the end we have a moderator online to help us so just go

1:28 ahead and use caps question and then your question if you don’t mind it makes it easier as we’re scrolling to find that and then last but most importantly

1:34 throw in a plus one if you like this tip or if you’re having a good time be sure to share that let’s go ahead and talk Keyboard Shortcuts

1:40 about our first time saver Time Saver Number One keyboard shortcuts I absolutely love this tip because I

1:47 myself and one of the folks who kind of forgets that this is an Erp system even though we’re in a web browser we kind of

1:54 think we do all those things you know with touch and slide and and uh using our Mouse to to interact with the system

2:01 but keyboard shortcuts can certainly help us be very very effective and efficient so I’m going to talk about a

2:06 few things first thing first I’m going to jump over here into business Central I’m going to use I have all the slides

2:13 here for you right so no worries feel free to take notes but

2:19 also you’re going to get these so F F1 control F1 is the first one I’m going to

2:24 talk about control F1 is our first one you’ll notice that right here this is our opening of help now sure you could

2:30 pop open the you could let go of the keyboard disengage the keyboard and go grab the mouse to move up to that

2:35 question mark Or you could just control F1 to pop open to help for the Dynamics

2:41 doc site help right on the page that’s really helpful I think the next one you

2:47 have is I’m going to go into sales here and I’m going to go into sales orders and I’ll just open a sales order and I

2:53 can use control F12 that’s a narrow view I use control F12 to make that wide view

3:00 this is really helpful I don’t have to leave the keyboard to see this all throughout the system remember business

3:05 Central remembers your view the last time you’re on this so for whatever reason if you added in in a narrow view

3:13 last time it’s going to open that way but control F 12 is going to get you there also while I’m in here I’m just

3:19 going to say this other cool one that I really like is f8 so if you’re in these

3:24 kind of line details if you use the fa key it’s gonna it’s like a copy paste of

3:30 the line directly above so I’m going to use my tab and I’m going to go over and tab to my

3:36 quantity field and I can do f8 to grab that or I can shift tab to go back so

3:42 throwing in some other keyboard shortcuts there so you get it but f8 this is great in the journal entry

3:48 window it’s great in detail line details like this super helpful while I’m here I’ll show you alt Q This is a favorite

3:54 this gets you to to the tell me section the system search section so again you

4:00 don’t have to disengage the keyboard go over to the mouse to go up there that may feel like that’s silly to kind of worry about but it is a Big Time Saver

4:06 when you can just jump right to it so now the next one is the escape so I have

4:12 the sales order window open and I’m just gonna hit the Escape key and it’s going to close that window not mean the window

4:18 in your browser I mean the window within business Central so sometimes we’ll open up the sales or then we’ll open up the

4:24 customer card then we’ll maybe we’ll open up an address field and we have these kind of layered windows The Escape

4:30 key just goes back one and back one and back one even here if I hit the Escape AP again that’s all I did it took me

4:36 back one more to my home screen and the last one here I want to share with you and I’m going to put a link in here but

4:42 the last one I’m going to share with you is refresh so you have refreshing of the

4:48 data within business Central um which is control F5 refresh the

4:53 entire page F5 to refresh the data within business Central those are nice if you’re waiting maybe your colleague

4:58 is posting a credit memo and you don’t see that in your list use that shortcut so that’s tip number one using keyboard

5:05 shortcuts I have a couple here oh I almost forgot my absolute favorite I can’t believe I forgot this that is the

5:12 zoom in and zoom out if you’re like me and your eyes are not as good as they

5:18 once were the control this is a typical Windows Behavior but the control and the

5:25 plus sign is going to go ahead and zoom business Central in on your browser in the control minus sign and is going to

5:32 zoom it out and notice it’s a dynamic switch to all of the things on your page

5:37 so it fits nicely I love this don’t squint if you don’t have to use that

5:43 keyboard shortcut and zoom into and that also works control and zoom up and down on your on your mouse if you already

5:50 have your mouse here’s a nice little link I’ll post that over there in the chat give me a second do that

5:55 oh there it is uh that’s the link to a not a complete this but a great list

6:00 um out there for keyboard shortcuts and varying functionality throughout the system let’s get on to Time Saver number Outlook Addin

6:08 two Time Saver number two Outlook add-in you’ve probably heard about this when

6:14 you first started looking into business Central if you hadn’t well you probably should have because it is a very

6:19 impressive uh interoperability function of business Central and I’m going to show you exactly what it’s all about

6:26 this super efficient and can incredibly uh to help you save time in a big way so

6:32 first you need to get it now I’m just going to go into the tell me and search for get

6:41 get the Microsoft or get the Outlook

6:47 add-in easy enough I’m going to open that up what this is going to do is going to

6:52 give you an option here so we’re going to do this quite simply you can have your administrator make this available across to everybody in the in the

6:59 organization or you could do it yourself a real simple wizard to help guide you through and it’s even going to send you

7:05 a sample email now that was easy but what is what about it right let’s take a look at what we can do with

7:15 I’m gonna slide my Outlook over here try to anyway

7:22 so here’s the email that comes out notice now I have I’m going to download

7:29 the picture so this is nice and easy to see on my home I have this contact insights under the subcategory for this

7:35 ad in business Central contact add-in excuse me contact insights that’s where this is opens up I have it pinned you

7:43 may want to pin it as well because if you’re going to constantly use Outlook to interact and the idea behind this is

7:48 efficiency you’re in Outlook you get an email from a client a vendor whomever

7:54 and then you close Outlook you go over to your browser and now you’re distracted because Facebook is open and

7:59 you got to see what Sally’s up to that kind of stuff or you can leave yourself

8:04 in Outlook and just interact with the real live connection to business Central and that’s what we have here so in this

8:10 particular case I’m going to say this email address is for this company and

8:15 this customer and look at this that how incredible is this it is everything

8:20 about this particular account that I might want to use to interact directly

8:26 from within Outlook so maybe I get an email from this particular customer let’s jump over here and I’ll kind of

8:32 say I want to order a chair so let’s open that up what contact is that associated with

8:39 pick that contact in a real environment you shouldn’t have to do this I’m in a demo environment but

8:45 I can see okay they have some past due amount they want to order a new chair they have a pass-through amount I can write from here I’d have to leave and go

8:52 to business Central I can see the invoice that’s passed through I can even click and see what that was and look

8:58 wouldn’t you know it they ordered six chairs this invoice is still past due maybe I can directly respond to them

9:04 from Outlook and take a screenshot of that and say hey can you forward me payment or maybe they’re Within credit

9:09 and there’s no problem but we want to create that new sales order so we could just go to new sales order let the

9:16 system in Outlook pull the data from within business Central right into Outlook and let me create the sales

9:22 order right here where I can just simply when I’m finished entering the details post this and email it off for the

9:28 client now that is powerful take that Oracle uh let’s go into our next tip

9:34 that’s Outlook add-in please be sure to check that out very very helpful that’s not smoke and mirrors it really works

9:40 that quickly and that well all right back to it let’s talk about time saving tip number three Quick Entry

9:48 this one has to do with how we enter data now I already kind of gave a little

9:53 sneak peek into the f8 keyboard shortcut which is that copy and paste from the line above so I don’t want to really get

9:59 into that too much here and try to build on this a little bit in a different way if you’re like me and you do a lot of

10:05 data entry I’m going to come into this sales order I’m going to talk about the importance of something called quick

10:11 entry and so if you have all the information and this might be more applicable on the AP side

10:17 but you have your information and you’re going to go start keying into business Central and if I want to create a new

10:24 item here I could create my new item and I can hit the tab notice when I hit tab

10:29 it goes to that field next is item reference number next is description next is location next is quantity Etc

10:36 but really what I want to do is I want to put my item number in and then go to the quantity and that’s it the rest the

10:44 system is doing for me so that’s called quick entry and how we do that how we modify quick entry is in the personalize

10:52 and this takes just a little bit of time to configure for you specifically for you but then it’s that way forever and I

10:58 think you’re going to really like this when you take the time to invest in setting it up so if I look at the field item reference and I just use this drop

11:05 down it says include in quick entry that means it’s already excluded so that’s good to go I don’t need it let’s go to

11:12 description is also excluded location code I’m going to pretend this says it was

11:18 included and we’re going to switch it to exclude it uh but in this case I don’t need location code and I want to exclude

11:26 it from Quick entry so exclude it from Quick entry now you might be thinking but Sean when you hit tab before it

11:31 still stopped that item reference number and it’s still stopped under in description I saw that in chat that’s

11:37 okay I’m going to explain how to do it so what the little bit of a difference here is when we’re finished setting up the things to include and exclude from

11:45 Quick entry is we simply use the keyboard to key in let’s see

11:53 pick my item I’m going to use the enter key now instead of tab enter is going to

11:58 follow the quick entry field rules whereas tab is going to go to Every

12:03 column so if I get trained if I train myself to use the enter key and a lot of Legacy systems use that the enter key so

12:11 this can be quite helpful maybe cut down the learning curve a little bit so I’m going to enter in my item number and I’m

12:17 going to hit enter now I’m going to hit enter you see what happened it went right over

12:22 to quantity I can use a space bar to say okay I went right over to quantity and

12:28 I’m going to hit number one and then enter and I could turn off quantity to assemble etc etc that’s quick entry it

12:34 can save you quite a bit of time for a highly repetitive tasks like sales line

12:40 order entry uh item D align item details n for for purchasing now that is one

12:48 method to speed up data entry here another thing we could do is use this share and edit this in Excel

12:54 so if we have a lot of data we need to update or maybe it’s a blanket purchase order or a journal entry that we’re

13:00 doing in a recurring way what we can do is edit this in Excel and modify the

13:05 information and then publish it back into business Central sometimes that’s easier sometimes that takes more time

13:11 than it’s worth so you find the balance but quite often I’m seeing that with larger data sets and that probably would

13:17 make sense if you had you know quite a few things that you’re ordering consistently and you want to just kind

13:23 of copy and paste it into that uh connection that edit and Excel

13:29 connection so let me drag this over into our shared screen here as it pulls the

13:35 data into Excel it’s going to use my authentication same authentication that I use to log into business Central so if

13:42 I don’t have access to the data it’s not going to let me do it but notice here I slide over and here’s my quantities and

13:48 I’m just going to make all these quantities 99 so that you can see all I

13:53 have to do is publish this this it’s going to push the data back into business Central

14:00 and if I refresh the data using my shortcut of F5

14:07 it’ll update my quantities to 99. how cool is that that’s a simple example of

14:12 how we can save time using different ways of entering the data don’t forget that f8 I showed that an earlier tip but

14:19 definitely worth exploring as well as our general edit in Excel which you can

14:26 use in so many different places it’s quite powerful The Next Step Time Saver Filter Lists

14:32 number four is saving filter lists now

14:40 filter list maybe there’s a better way of of describing these in the GP Dynamics GP or Great Plains world we

14:47 call them smart lists maybe we just simply call them that now but these lists that live within business Central

14:52 this is some sort of is run based on these lists or at least the end user

14:58 experiences uh sort of centered around these lists and we can make sure I want

15:03 to make sure that you’re aware of how we can save them and how these can be properly used in your workplace environment let me know what you think

15:10 and how you use Save lists in the in the comments section but let’s jump in and talk about this a little bit so I’m

15:16 going to go over into I’m going to use my Escape key to go back to the home screen

15:24 and then I’m going to go into my chart of accounts

15:33 and from here I’m going to take a look at one of my charts registers so let’s

15:39 look at um let’s see it’s always good to go to the revenue account in our demo system

15:46 um so let’s take a look at that I’m going to slide down I think look at my AR but there’s usually good data

15:55 in our Revenue accounts so let’s take a look here

16:04 and when I click on that because I’m clicking on that link that flow link from within the chart of accounts it

16:10 already knows that I want to filter this by the GL account 40200 so you see my

16:17 filter is turned on so if it’s not already there maybe you go into a list from a different way and it’s not there

16:23 so you simply use the filter icon to turn on the filter pane

16:29 we can add different ways now this particular one is the 4200 account

16:36 from well no date no date restrictions yet so let’s go ahead and maybe I’m

16:42 responsible for reconciling this account or I do some analysis on it we’re going to do posting dates

16:48 and we’re going to also say we want this to be for last year so I’m going to say for 2022 through 12 31 2022.

16:57 there we go uh and that’ll filter my list down

17:03 boom just like that so you can probably see if you already have this saved off but

17:09 basically what we need to do is we need to come up and do save as and give it a name so now we always have this list now

17:16 what do we want to do with this list so talk about that in our next step for saving filter list but this is really

17:21 powerful to just save it to always have it so anytime I want to see the 4200 account I can quickly come in to my

17:29 saved list and click on this and see uh 4200 for the previous year Saving Lists

17:34 now let me show you another way that saving lists can be quite helpful so imagine you are responsible for a

17:40 particular client or a particular vendor and you get phone phone calls or emails

17:47 from them often I’m going to go back and I’m going to go to my menu and I’m going to go into my customer list the idea

17:54 here is that you get a phone call or maybe an email from your favorite client or somebody that you’re working with all

18:00 the time and instead of having to you know go through the four five six different clicks it takes to get them

18:07 let’s go ahead and just filter down all of our posted sales invoices by the

18:13 customer number and we’ll just use 10 000 for this example and we’re going to save it

18:22 and we’ll save it customer 10 000. and which is uh

18:29 so now I have that saved so now anytime I have an interaction with this particular customer or client I could

18:36 quickly come to that list and then from here I can start to do my own filtering another really cool thing here is this

18:42 really uh this friendly share button here so we can share this out into Excel

18:49 so that we have a dynamic refreshable report in Excel that we can always be using as well which is very powerful so

18:56 saving this very important make them yours make it part of your business process so that while you’re interacting

19:03 with uh clients vendors Etc it’s easy to get to also another great one is if you

19:08 respond if you’re an accountant and you’re responsible for a certain account reconciliations just having a list of

19:13 your accounts and filters I think I kind of alluded to that with the 4200 although that’s a balance sheet or a p l

19:19 account um having your list of accounts there with the proper date filters and we’ll

19:25 talk about that coming up next is Another Time Saver speed speaking of Time Savers Time Saver number five is Bookmarks

19:35 bookmarks and we’re going to talk about books bookmarks this might take just a minute hang tight with me and follow me

19:41 a little bit along this journey because there’s a couple things that are I think are pretty important to talk about and as I work with with folks around the

19:47 globe everybody sort of does it differently but at the end of the day I think everybody’s trying to do it in a

19:52 very similar way because naturally we want to be more efficient we want to be quicker in what we do

19:59 and how we get to the data especially if you’re on a phone call or teams call email is not so much you might not worry

20:07 about the extra 15 seconds or 20 seconds something takes but on a phone call that feels like a very long time so talking

20:14 about bookmarks in the in the system we’re going to talk about two different kinds of bookmarks in the system there

20:21 is a bookmark where you can anchor or dock a page a form Etc directly to your

20:28 home screen in business Central notices aged accounts receivables if I click this this report dialog box I

20:36 have bookmarked really easy for me to get to try to get to a report in business Central in just

20:44 one click this is not bad I’m telling you that’s quite helpful more on that in a minute but you could do this for many

20:50 areas in the system now if you notice I also have chart of accounts here we can’t bookmark the specific list it

20:59 maybe you can and I just don’t know so if you know a way to bookmark in business Central to specific list that

21:05 you filter down let me know in the comments but if you notice it’s taking me here but

21:10 the next thing I want to talk about is using your browser bookmarks and I prefer Firefox I don’t know why I’ve

21:18 been using it for a long time creature habit maybe but I do love that no matter which machine I’m on if I’m logged into

21:25 the same profile my browser that’s available for Chrome Edge Firefox and

21:30 all the popular browsers out there that business Central is compatible with your profile can be synced across

21:37 devices which is which is really great because this next part of this tip I think probably the more important

21:43 important part of this time saving tip is using your browser now a lot of folks use favorites and bookmarks across the

21:49 top of your browser if if you do and that’s your preference fantastic I’m not

21:56 trying to suggest you need to switch to the left on mine is on the left mostly because I think that’s kind of how most

22:01 things are in the Microsoft space there’s blades or panels either on the left or right hand side we

22:08 kind of reserve the top for the operating or the system ribbon so I use

22:13 my bookmarks on the left anyway long story short if you prefer the top so be it what I’m suggesting here is we make a

22:20 business Central shortcut folder and I have one here and I’m just gonna I’m in Sean’s online store

22:26 which is my second favorite retail spot next to that big river in South America

22:31 uh Sal uh Sean’s online store and now what I want to do is I want to say maybe

22:37 let me go into remember that chart of account list

22:42 let’s go to that and I’m just going to bookmark let me

22:48 open up my filters uh it was on Revenue I think

22:57 yeah it was on the 4200 that’s right if if I’m going too slow nudge me in the

23:03 comments so I can hurry up uh so now here what I could do is I could take here’s my 4200 for previous year now I

23:10 couldn’t bookmark this particular filter list into my header in business Central

23:15 but simply taking this and dragging and dropping it into my

23:21 um bookmarks menu in my browser

23:26 let me see if I can actually be successful in doing that there we go I think I probably did it twice now I have

23:32 this here so no matter where I am I could just simply click that bookmark and let’s talk about this because

23:39 there’s so many good examples of this I think if I’m on the phone with somebody get an email or I’m performing my my

23:45 tasks on a monthly basis just having this so maybe you want to rename this a little differently maybe you want to

23:50 rename it to the company um and maybe you want to rename it to something a little more you know

23:57 specific to you here I’m in my same same environment on my tenant in a different

24:03 company called Cronus and I could go to that same account

24:10 4200 in a different company

24:16 and this is why I said maybe you want to switch how you name your bookmark but I

24:21 can do the same thing and so I can have a tab for Sean’s online store looking at this

24:28 account information and a tab for Cronus with the same information and bookmark

24:34 these right so I can take this one

24:40 and drag it down here also most browsers are Ctrl D lets you bookmark it but I

24:48 just like to drag and drop so here I’m just going to edit this and I’m going to say hey this was Cronus 4200.

24:55 and this one was Sean’s online store 40.

25:04 200. now I have them very easily at my

25:09 fingertips and imagine now if I want to do one more like if I go into where did

25:16 I put that um did I have one for vendors I may have set it up for vendors but if I’m always

25:22 working with the same client or the same vendor or dealing with the register for

25:27 sales individual or any of those things where I have a list that controls the data set that I’m looking for you saw

25:33 how many times I had to click that three four times instead what I really could do is just filter this out create my

25:40 favorite save my list and bookmark it on my browser bookmarks beauty of this is

25:47 again if you kind of go back full circle if I’m using a modern browser with a

25:52 profile and I pick up my Surface or my work laptop or my worktop laptops out of

25:58 commission I get a new one I just log back in and have all of my shortcuts that is a big Time Saver I don’t want to

26:04 beat this up but it’s also fantastic to use for different companies uh specific reports reports are hard to find in the Reports

26:11 system um I think it’s an excellent way to do uh to get quick access to things in your Meet Sean

26:17 system so be sure to check that out set it up I just want to take a pause

26:22 real quick and say hello again my name is Sean dorbert thank you again for joining us here at

26:29 Dynamics con and specifically me during this session and throwing one of your valuable votes uh to hear this topic I

26:36 hope through the first five you’ve at least picked up some good fun tips that either you or your colleagues can use uh

26:43 we have more to go we’re not done so stick around we’re not done don’t forget to interact in the chat just a little

26:48 bit about me I write on my personal blog space lifehacks365.com there’s a link here

26:54 I’ll drop a quick Link in the chat as well I write about all things business Central GP Excel power bi yeah so not

27:03 all things but those things I also have some recordings out there that you may be interested in some of my previous

27:09 Dynamics con recordings some of the other conferences I’ve attended to that the session has been

27:15 made public I’m the vice president of service and Delivery at essay Global essay Global is an international

27:20 organization that services and supports and implements pretty much all things Microsoft but in a dynamic space we are

27:29 a partner an 11 time partner of the year so if you’re looking for a partner or you need some sort of help feel free to

27:35 find me on LinkedIn or Twitter if you will or on my personal side I also will

27:41 be presenting at some other events this year some of note is the Dynamics con live event in Scottsdale Arizona coming

27:47 up in May which I’m really really excited about also will be at the partner only event directions which is

27:53 in Orlando and I am working on my session submissions for Summit North America which will be in Charlotte North

28:00 Carolina my backyard please come and join me at any of these events without further Ado we’ll go ahead and get

28:06 started uh back into the last half of our time saving tips Time Savings tip

28:13 number six running out of fingers uh Searching and Reporting on Shortcut Dimensions

28:19 Time Saver tip number six is searching and Reporting on shortcut dimensions and

28:27 I put this in because I recently been working with a client a few clients actually and a hat tip to some of my fellow

28:34 presenters and MVPs Carrie I came across this on Carrie session and it’s quite a

28:40 useful tip that when when an individual is looking for information

28:45 Beyond Global one and Global two dimensions and how we do this is we we

28:51 can search for the shortcut Dimensions I’m going to walk through that a little bit so if I jump over to my

28:58 4200 shortcut in the bookmark that we set up

29:04 to the save filter that we set up in business Central for the in this case the Cronus company single click get

29:12 there with ease what I’m going to do is I’m going to show you how we can see this GL the shortcut dimensions

29:18 so here we are on the 4200 saved list that we use our bookmark to access real

29:25 easy one click and what we see here you notice we’ve got our department code and customer group code in my system that’s

29:31 Global Dimension one and two and we don’t have the ability to add you might

29:36 be thinking maybe it’s in the personalized ad cons it’s not there um

29:41 but if we need to search Beyond if we need to filter this Beyond Global one

29:47 and Global 2 and use our other shortcut Dimensions which are valuable in our system so I

29:53 think this is this is quite helpful now this has moved around a little bit but I want to point it out so we’re going to go to our ellipse here

30:01 and if it didn’t move again we’re going to go to related entry other

30:08 GL Dimension overview easy as pie I’ll have that in the slide

30:13 I will go to GL Dimension overview this is going to take our same data set that you have active and we have to show The

30:19 Matrix this one more click show The Matrix now I don’t know of a way to to bookmark

30:25 this window I’ve tried and if you know the way to quickly get to this window

30:31 um differently than what I just showed please let me know in the comments it is a two three click step process but the

30:37 I’m going to control F12 to widen that from our keyboard shortcuts and now you

30:42 can see I see all my other my shortcut dimensions in here and I can filter to these as

30:50 well so that’s a nice way to track that down and you can also using another one of our tips move this

30:57 to Excel for review um and make it easier for you to get that

31:03 analytic information that you need I want to point out that

31:10 I thought it was important to show out that even though you can set the dimension filter on these data sets in

31:16 the list View couldn’t figure out a way to get the shortcut to mentioned to actually show

31:22 so let me know in the comments if if that’s something maybe I just need to be shown how to do if there’s a workaround

31:27 but I couldn’t get those to show so I want to push in this data to Excel and do my pivoting there that’s saving time

31:34 uh trying to get the information from your shortcut dimensions that was time saving tip number eight

31:43 we’ll move on using the report scheduler now this is a

31:50 beauty and I love this one and it’s it takes a little bit it’s a little sensitive at the same time it probably

31:55 want to work with your partner or maybe your system admin internally just to make sure that we’re not crashed in the

32:01 system by running these reports uh in the background but the idea behind this

32:07 is is twofold one you have the need to get some information and you want it in

32:14 a in a um an easy access way now you can go I think our example here on the home

32:20 screen is I’ll Escape back Escape back Escape back on our home screen was the

32:27 age receivables report

32:33 yeah age receivables reports so I was able to get that doc that bookmark that

32:38 if you will to my home screen in business Central not bad but basically what I’m saying is Well what if I want

32:44 this to just be given to me to be delivered to me and we can schedule

32:49 these to be delivered to you in your report inbox which is accessible it’s

32:55 like a drawer on your home screen in business Central and even more so I’m kind of building up to the part that I

33:00 think is my favorite part is if you get it in a uh you can get this in a PDF and or

33:08 Excel or word and they become in my mind sort of like snapshots if you will so if

33:14 you want to see what the age receivables was as of last Friday now some reports

33:19 give you that aged as of option and maybe age you know think Beyond age what

33:24 was the customer balance last week or what was the inventory status last week or what was fill in the blank these PDFs

33:32 can help create sort of a snapshot of that information in that moment in time well how you get to it did you find your

33:39 report now I don’t think this is possible for um account schedules or recently renamed

33:46 to financial reports um I may be wrong if you know of a way please let me know but I don’t I couldn’t quite figure that out but for

33:53 most reports if you choose send to you’re going to see all of the output

33:58 options and then one bonus one which is schedule and so for this particular one I’m going to schedule it and this open

34:04 opens up the schedule window and for me here is where we tell it how often we want to run it what report output type

34:12 we want notice here I could do this in Word Excel I can print it or I can put

34:17 it to PDF when do I want to run it next and what’s the or with the next run date formula which

34:25 we’ll talk about in our next our next tip and we hit OK and what this will do

34:30 then is every time this gets triggered by the rules that you create if I scroll

34:36 down here to my report inbox that PDF will be available my report inbox now

34:42 I have one in here this is from 11 27 oh it’s from now right now how about

34:47 that so it ran it on demand and here it is so now this PDF be available and then when

34:53 it runs again I’ll have another PDF available with that snapshot so this is all set up and managed and created through

34:59 job queue um so be you know like I said I think there’s an element of caution that needs to be applied but can be very

35:05 helpful very powerful and save you the time of having to do this activity each and every time you need to do it so what

35:13 do you think about uh scheduling report these can be modified incidentally that I thought that was a great add-on tip to

35:18 this one uh primarily because if you create it and you haven’t put all of the

35:24 proper controls in um or it’s not behaving the way that you expected it to from the options that you

35:29 put in you can always go into the job queue and modify that job queue entry

35:35 you can even turn them off so maybe you set it up and it’s not exact and it’s

35:41 not anything what you want you could turn it off very good very cool let me know if you like that one if you’re using that one

35:46 if you know of any gotchas to report scheduling love to hear from you in the comments look at that so we got Time

35:52 Saver number seven out of order that’s okay um probably because I did a a review and Date Formulas

35:59 I thought well the date formula might make more sense coming after uh go me for being prepared uh but nonetheless

36:05 the next one is using date formulas and there are so many different ways you can use date formulas it is a key separator

36:11 a key identifier for what makes business Central different than other tools I

36:18 think it is there’s many things but this is one of them and date formula is that and and it is a Big Time Saver and so

36:25 what I want to talk about here is I’ve got these can be used in job queues like I just showed if you’re running reports

36:31 maybe you want to run them at the end of every month maybe you want to run them run them on the uh seventh working day

36:37 of the month for the previous month date formulas can get you there so don’t

36:43 worry about it being too Dynamic we could definitely create that but another place that you could use this is on our

36:51 saved list remember we talked about our saved lists and in that particular one we were looking at

36:58 was the 4200 I’m going to jump in here and notice that we had our dates now

37:04 this was last year maybe this is an annual reconciled account instead of every year having to come in here to

37:10 change my dates from 2022 to now you

37:15 know next year it’ll be 2023 I can take some of the tips from date formulas and

37:22 incorporate that into my lists my report scheduler what have you it’s not

37:27 everywhere please know that there are areas that it won’t work with but a lot

37:32 of the places where it matters the most where things are repetitive and need to be dynamic then you can use day formulas

37:39 most times so take note here on my previous year report I have that date what looks to be keyed there as 1 1 2022

37:47 to the end of the year but if I click on that you can see that I actually have the date formula in there of minus one y

37:54 minus Cy through that’s the dot dot dot Cy minus 1y now yeah that’s a little

38:01 cumbersome totally agree and there might be a better way to represent this if you know of a better way to represent the start of last year to the end of last

38:08 year in about using date formulas let me know in the chat this is the way that I came up with it it works

38:14 but basically that’s just one way you can use date formulas to save you time so you don’t have to revisit those

38:21 things this is fantastic to use in recurring batches as well job cues save

38:28 report filters I’m trying to think what else anything anything um

38:33 yeah tell me what you use it for actually I’d love to hear what you find a date formula to be most useful for if

38:40 you’re using if not let me know what you’re looking forward to using it the most this is great for recurring entries I love it uh here is an example I got

38:47 this from that nav guy thank you that nav guy for publishing this blog post I use this I have a bookmark in my web

38:53 browser bookmarks and I thought I would share it with you here I love it because it actually tells us the example if the

38:59 date is this using the state formula will get you this and that’s actually how I came up with the from start date

39:06 of last year to the end date last year there are others for sure but these are some of the most common so that’s tip

39:12 number seven what was eight but now seven and we’re gonna do great great math and jump into Time Saver number

39:19 nine Time Saver number nine we’re almost there at the end stay with me they give Batch Posting

39:25 me a plus one if you’re using any of those tips which one don’t forget to post your questions in there we’ll do our best to answer them Time Saver

39:31 number nine is referring to batch posting um I again this is this comes direct

39:37 from end user and experience end user experience with one or two of the clients that I’ve worked with recently

39:43 and basically the back story is we’re posting multiple multiple sales orders or purchase orders I think was the

39:50 actual example and multiple meaning a lot not just two our example is going to

39:55 walk through too but you know you have to wait for all of that processing to

40:01 finish and goodness if somebody else is doing the same thing you’re likely to get an error because there’s some sort

40:06 of lock that goes onto the table during this processing if you’ve experienced that let me know how you get around it

40:12 if you’re not using batch posting I’ll share the link to this here I’ll post it in the chat but basically this is quite

40:18 simple it’s available for sales and receivable setup also available for for um purchasing and payable setup pretty

40:25 easy here’s the options post with job queue post and print with job queue notify on success and Report output type

40:33 PDF now 9.2 here bonus tip is if you use PDF it

40:39 will actually drop that PDF into the report inbox on your business Central

40:44 home screen which I find to be quite helpful basically we’re going to go in here we’re going to select our multiple

40:50 once it’s set up we’re going to select our multiple purchase orders or multiple sales orders

40:55 and we’re going to go to post post batch now there’s not a batch we’re adding these two it’s a batch because we’ve

41:02 selected more and I want to just make sure to not take for granted whether or not you’re aware of how that works so

41:09 let’s do purchase orders so here we are in our list of purchase

41:15 orders and what we’re going to do is we want to post more than one we’re going to choose this select

41:21 and we’re going to pick which ones we want to post we’re going to go to post and post batch incidentally keyboard

41:28 shortcut shortcut Ctrl a will select all of them for you so we’ll do select more

41:37 and then Ctrl a to select all or you can hit the top that is

41:42 tip number nine batch posting that brings us to our last tip for today our

41:48 last time saving tip for today and this is power automate specifically Power Automate

41:56 specifically power automate in a way to synchronize data from one entity in your

42:03 environment on your tenant to other entities so the story here is if I have

42:09 multiple companies and they’re fairly much in line which is is quite often the

42:14 case not a requirement but quite often the case we want things to happen in one entity and also automatically happen in

42:23 the other entities so I’ve got Sean’s online store in

42:29 South Carolina Sean’s online store in Missouri and I have those two set up as

42:35 different entities and every time I create a vendor or a vendor I want it to automatically create it in the other

42:42 entities as well now this does require a premium license through through automate

42:48 but I was able to set this up quite easily I create when the I built the

42:53 flow saying when the record is created get the data and create it in the other entity and every time

43:01 I do that in that order it’s going to seamlessly create that record in the

43:06 other company for me saving me that time now if you don’t need it let’s say you don’t need two out of every 20 that’s

43:12 okay if you don’t need it they’re free to delete and it’s not going to cause any harm but that is tip number 10 using

43:19 power automate if you’re interested in knowing how to use power automate for this kind of information feel free to continue here at Dynamics con virtual I

43:26 know at the live event there’s some good topics around this as well and all throughout the community in general that

43:32 brings us to the end of our time here at least during this segment our next segment don’t go anywhere right over

43:38 here on the other side is our live q a once again my name is Sean door thank you for being here I look forward to

43:44 talking with you in just a minute [Music]

43:58 thank you

Leave a Reply